American Horror Story Recap: “A Writer Writes; a Surgeon Cuts”

So far we know The House has claimed at least 17 victims; this week, we discover one of them was a famous real-life case: Elizabeth Short, a.k.a. the Black Dahlia. Interesting as each murder may be, the ghosts must be living cheek-to-jowl at this point. And as this spirit mob grows larger, the connecting story threads between them grow ever more tenuous—leaving crowds of dead people serving no purpose. But the writers would gladly discard coherence for a shot of a male derriere, and we would be foolish to expect otherwise.

The big reveal of the previous episode—It Was Tate in The Rubber Gimp Suit All Along!—was disappointingly predictable. We’d already seen Tate in the suit, and that should have been a red herring, not the truth. When the rest of the show is violently exploding in different directions, its best mystery should not be resolved with such an anticlimax. The Secret of the Gimp Suit was supposed to be the apex of the series’ Ionesco-style absurdity, and instead it concluded with a sad trombone noise. Waaah waah!

Another development from last week was Vivian's being committed to a mental institution. Before you feel sorry for her, just think—at least she’s out of The House for now. It’s confirmed this week that one of her babies is Ben’s and the other is Tate’s, and we learn the nifty term for twins with different fathers: heteropaternal superfecundation (yep, that’s a real thing). And according to Jessica Lange’s psychic friend, the child of a human and a spirit is destined to be the Antichrist, so get ready for the battle of Good Twin versus Evil Twin! Although, since the good twin will be Ben’s child, it might be more accurate to say the battle of Mediocre, Bland, and Whiny Twin versus Evil Twin. The evil twin might come off as the more sympathetic of the two, all things considered.

Hayden, whose soap-opera theatrics are up since her demise, is the unsympathetic focus of the episode. She plans to steal the twins when they’re born, tries to win Ben back, and, unforgivably, sleeps with and kills Jessica Lange’s boy-toy lover. Any pity we might’ve felt for the murdered mistress is as dead and mutilated as the boy toy himself—mad scientist Dr. Montgomery carved him up in the same style he had carved up the Black Dahlia in 1947, when she accidentally died in The House and her body needed disposal. When asked why he’d bisected her body, removed her intestines, and drained her blood back then, he cheerfully replies, “A writer writes; a surgeon cuts.” Obviously. Thus one of L.A.’s most notorious unsolved murders is casually solved.

Ben continues to be a jerk who refuses to believe Vivian’s I-was-raped-by-a-rubber-suit-guy story, when that’s possibly the most believable thing to have happened since they moved. Instead, he visits her in the asylum and berates her for cheating on him. Swell guy. But he finally does something not horrible, and refuses the advances from Hayden, Moira the maid, the Black Dahlia—and even the Moira/Dahlia offer of a threesome. As a reward, he can now see Moira as the older version of herself, and thus “how things really are,” and decides maybe Vivian was not so crazy after all. Have all the Harmons been clued in to The House being haunted at last?

Probably not, but at least until next week, we can dream.

Best obscure reference of the episode: The reason the Black Dahlia goes to The House is because the owner at the time was a dentist—the real Elizabeth Short was listed in her autopsy as having “badly decayed teeth.”

For VF.com’s recaps of previousAmerican Horror Story episodes read here.